Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Bathers at Tahiti, 1897
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Te Rerioa (The Dream), 1897
The Courtauld Gallery, London
Collecting Gauguin: Samuel Courtauld in the ’20s This summer exhibition presents the complete collection of works by Paul Gauguin in the collection of the Courtauld Gallery, together with the loan of two important works by Gauguin formerly in Samuel Courtauld’s private collection.
Courtauld Gallery – 20 June to 8 September 2013
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Source: Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld Gallery holds the most important collection of works in the United Kingdom by the Post-Impressionist master Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Assembled by the pioneering collector Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947), it includes major paintings and works on paper as well as one of only two marble sculptures ever created by the artist. The exhibition includes two paintings by Gauguin formerly in Courtauld’s private collection: “Martinique Landscape” (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh) and “Bathers at Tahiti” (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham).
In 1910 the critic Roger Fry organised his ground-breaking and famously controversial exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry included over forty works by Gauguin (more than by any other artist) and also chose a work by him for the poster, a rare surviving copy of which will be included in the display. Whilst a small number of other individuals acquired single paintings, Courtauld was the only other early collector to assemble a major group of works by Gauguin.
Samuel Courtauld’s acquisitions of works by Gauguin span the short decade in which he assembled his great collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. He bought his first paintings by the artist in 1923, purchasing “Bathers at Tahiti”, which he later sold, and “The Haystacks”, an outstanding example of the artist’s work in Brittany. The earliest painting in the exhibition is “Martinique Landscape”, 1887, an important large work dating from the four fruitful months that Gauguin spent on this French colonial possession in the Caribbean.
Courtauld acquired his last painting by Gauguin in 1929 when he paid £13,600 for “Te Rerioa (The Dream)”. Roger Fry, who saw the work in the gallery of the dealer Paul Rosenberg in Paris shortly after Courtauld’s visit, wrote an enthusiastic letter, urging his friend to buy what he described as “the masterpiece of Gauguin”. Samuel Courtauld lived with “Te Rerioa” for just three years before presenting it, along with most of his other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, as part of his founding gift to The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932. The work remains one of the highlights of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection.
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